Preventing words from wearing out
Pierre Testard, writer and translator, on the challenges of both disciplines

Dear Pierre Testard, you have a cosmopolitan background. Born in Paris, you grew up in London. You spent a long time in Italy and Greece, and have been in Berlin since 2019. If you were to start a literary salon with an international appeal, who would be at the top of your guest list and for what reason?
P.T.: I would happily bring Eileen Myles and Alejandro Zambra together because as well as their books, I like their attitude. There’s a light-heartedness and self-confidence about them and their writing which is very appealing. They’re also often funny. But I’m not sure they would have much to share. Maybe I’d have to invite someone much more serious like Jenny Erpenbeck or someone with a laconic mind, say Fleur Jaeggy. But then they might all look at each other for hours in utter silence and then just walk away.
Would an "existentialist breakfast" - a strong coffee and a Gitane or a Gauloise - in a café put you in a creative mood? Can you talk about your writing routine?
P.T.: Being able to write definitely has a lot to do with being in the right material conditions, and as far as I know, the existentialists mainly wrote in cafés because they didn’t have proper heating at home. Nowadays, it’s easier to stay warm and smoke at home, even in Berlin. Last year, I wrote very little, maybe because I don’t smoke and was trying to limit my consumption of gas during the energy crisis. What works for me is a desk, a computer, an app that blocks the websites I spend the most time on, enough books I can open now and then, avoiding any type of domestic task before I start and ignoring the door bell at all costs. I also tend to never leave my desk, which is a big mistake. Every time I do, because I’m distracted and decide to go and hang the laundry or answer the door anyway, a sentence I was struggling to write for hours suddenly unfolds in my mind, in all clarity.
Where is it good to go brainstorming in Berlin? A bench in a park or the underground? Or do you prefer isolation when it comes to writing and translating?
P.T.: Although I do collect images or ideas from the streets of Berlin, it’s never intentional. I never set out for a walk and think I’m going to be able to find inspiration in a specific place. Usually, when I’m writing (on my own, at my desk or in a library), I remember the detail of a scene I witnessed, of an image or of an inscription and I wonder if it can work its way into the sentence or the paragraph I’m working on. There’s a tomb somewhere in a cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg which says ‘Warum?’. And this question somehow ended up in my novel, Les Enfants Boetti, but on an other (fictional) gravestone and in a different language.
Some authors have familiarized themselves with special subjects. In Herman Melville's case whaling, Mark Twain with Mississippi steamships. Honoré de Balzac even with several areas, e.g. book printing and high finance - and long before Patrick Süskind, in the art of perfume making. The results were powerfully incorporated into their literary work. Do you have a special area of interest or could you imagine familiarizing yourself with a special field for the sake of literature?
P.T.: I research specific information or details as I write but I don’t really know what I’m writing about until I write. My writing stems from visual elements and description of places, which are always somehow fictional, although they obviously originate in places I know, memories or even pictures. However, I’m not even sure I could say what the subject of Les Enfants Boetti is because the whole book was built, somewhat unintentionally, around a fleeting character, Lou Tamma, an artist who ends up haunting all the other characters. And I’m now writing a novel in which the main characters are musicians but I’m almost certain I’m not writing a book about music. So to answer your question, I could imagine exploring a specific theme in order to write a book but it hasn’t happened yet and I seem to write differently.
Many storytellers are interested in communicating with the reader. To this end, writers perhaps tend to create blank spaces that call for imaginative filling. Even though the author holds the narrative reins firmly in his hand, the characters gain a life of their own. What are your strategies for actively involving the reader in the understanding of the text? I'm thinking of your novel "Les Enfants Boetti"…
P.T.: For me, writing is more about language and how you keep up the impulse which made you start a text and prevent it from wearing out and ending up sounding conventional. If one is able to do that, I think the reader will feel it and might even be moved by it.
Umberto Eco once said that he had thought books spoke of the world outside of books. Until at some point it had dawned on him, that books often speak of other books – a whisper, a "dialogue between parchment and parchment". Does that also apply to you and your way of writing?
P.T.: Certainly. I can’t work on a text for very long without opening a book and looking for a turn of phrase or a tone that will somehow feed my own writing. Les Enfants Boetti is full of plagiarisms, transformed translations and hidden quotes. I sometimes think of writing as pretending to be dead and speaking with other dead writers so as to get a better understanding of the living.
You translate from English. Do translators have more of a serving function or do you have to be an artist yourself to translate well? When translating, do you have the ambition to create a work of art on a par with the original?
P.T.: It’s difficult for me to answer your questions about translating because they come at a time when I find it hard, if not impossible, to be both a dedicated writer and a dedicated translator. In fact, I can’t think of so many remarkable translators who are outstanding writers, and vice-versa. Translating is challenging enough that one can’t really afford to do it part-time or half-heartedly. If I put aside the translating work I do simply to earn money, which is essentially non-literary, translating for me has become a sort of game which helps me write. Because I read in four or five different languages and very often read in translation, I’m constantly wondering what this or that sentence I’m fond of might sound like in another language. And so I try and translate it into French and potentially include it in the story I’m working on, if it’s relevant at all. Or I’ll just open a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, say Probleme, probleme (from the collection Simultan) and randomly translate an extract into English or into French. At first, it will seem blurry and clumsy but if I edit it slightly, it might start sounding interestingly bachmannian and strangely French. That’s how some bits and pieces of translated or untranslated Italian, English and Spanish ended up in Les Enfants Boetti. And that’s why I also used the opening of the following poem by Emily Dickinson:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons –
That Oppresses. (…)
Except that in my book, Lou Tamma pronounces these words in Italian.
Dear Pierre Testard, the participation in the Kulturring-project "Begegnungen Wort-Wörtlich-Gesprächsfreude Grenzenlos", by you as an author and literary translator, has been an animated and stimulating journey into the field of writing and translating. Thank you very much for taking the time for our conversation. It was a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much and all the best for your future plans!
Pierre Testard has been living in Berlin since 2019. He studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, Modern History at King's College London, and more recently (2017-2019) Creative Writing at l'Université Paris VIII - Saint-Denis.
His first book-length translation was of a conceptual book called Bad Driver written in English by two artists based in Berlin, Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda. It was printed in a very limited edition and will be part of the permanent collection of the Frac Lorraine, a regional art institute based in Metz, in eastern France. The text itself is a satire of an academic book which makes fun of the many prejudices Westerners have of Chinese and Japanese culture. He also translated a couple of poems by Eileen Myles and a few extracts from essays or novels which can mainly be found here: https://www.specimen.press/writers/pierre-testard/. His translation is actually from German, from the first pages of Park, a novel by a young writer called Marius Goldhorn.
There are two great writers whose books are largely ignored in France and that he would love to translate: Elizabeth Hardwick and Rainald Goetz. Hardwick's Sleepless Nights was translated a few years ago in France, already out of print, and Rave by Rainald Goetz doesn't exist in French.
Les Enfants Boetti was published in 2022. It is the story of how two siblings from Rome, Ada and Angelo, are haunted by their childhood memories and in particular by a friend of their parents, Lou Tamma, an artist, who seems to hover above them, wherever they are, in Rome or London, in sleep or at work. The narrator becomes himself enthralled by this figure and tries to find this person.
Pierre Testard is currently writing a novel about three musicians who live in a caravan on the edge of a small village in Burgundy, in the centre of France. They are both a source of curiosity and concern for the village because they are very secretive about their music and don't seem to have any convincing reason to be living there. 2023 Pierre read at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin the opening chapter of the book. See the following link https://lcb.de/pierre-testard-uebersetzung/.
Interview: Martina Pfeiffer